Once again Google plays down the significance of the PageRank patent. Is search amongst the giants really as similar as he says here? I know that Google has had to do a lot of tricks to avoid gaming of PageRank, but isn't PageRank still the core?
What's more significant is the theft of the Yahoo text ad model/patent, and the multi-billion $ payoff for its use. I don't know exactly how they pulled that off, but the patent's worth must be around $100 billion.
As a postscript, that patent came from Overture (which came from the Idealab incubator), which itself was a billion-dollar buyout. I wonder if a company will in turn buy its use off Google for even more?
